J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > First Italian Tour 1819-20 > Rome and Florence Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Part of a View of Lake Trasimene; Also a Study of the Medici Vase from the Uffizi Gallery, Florence 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Part of a View of Lake Trasimene; Also a Study of the Medici Vase from the Uffizi Gallery, Florence’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 34 Verso:
Part of a View of Lake Trasimene; Also a Study of the Medici Vase from the Uffizi Gallery, Florence 1819
D16549
Turner Bequest CXCI 34 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 113 x 189 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
As Cecilia Powell first identified, the main sketch on this page represents part of a view of Lake Trasimene, an Umbrian lake approximately ten miles west of Perugia which Turner passed en route between Rome and Florence in 1819.1 The body of water is famous as the site of a battle between Hannibal and the Romans during the Second Punic War in 217 BC. Turner’s study depicts the lake from the north with the small island of Isola Minore on the far right-hand side. The composition continues on the opposite sheet of the double-page spread, see folio 35 (D16550). Prior to his travels Turner had made a small pen-and-ink copy of an engraved view of Lake Trasimene after John ‘Warwick’ Smith (1749–1831), see the Italian Guide Book sketchbook (Tate D13963; Turner Bequest CLXXII 17).
Also in the bottom left-hand corner of the page is a small study of the Medici vase, a first-century Greek marble decorated with bas-reliefs.2 Turner would have seen the object, known as a krater, exhibited in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.3

Nicola Moorby
December 2010

1
Powell 1984, p.429.
2
Ibid.
3
Reproduced in Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900, New Haven and London 1981, fig.167, p.315.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Part of a View of Lake Trasimene; Also a Study of the Medici Vase from the Uffizi Gallery, Florence 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, December 2010, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-part-of-a-view-of-lake-trasimene-also-a-study-of-the-medici-r1138442, accessed 22 July 2025.